Restoring ’57 Corvette Seats--Part I

Al Knoch Makes Our Old Look New Again

Step By Step

Well start with the seat bottoms. Al explained that they dont just reskin the seats, they restore them. That means the seat frames get sand-blasted and painted, and new springs are installed. You can sand-blast and paint your own seat frames like we did, or you can pay Al to do it.

Al Knoch supplies a paper-coated wire kit that youll need to restore the seat. The wire provides mounting points for the hog rings, and the paper coating keeps the wire from damaging the surrounding materials.

Also take the time to hog-ring the springs to each other and to the seat base. Make sure the springs are centered, or youll have to remove all of the hog rings to move them. They can be a real pig to remove (pun intended).

Install the seat foam over the burlap and make sure the two grooves on the top side of the foam match up with the two paper-wrapped wires you installed to the retainer. Youll need to hog-ring the seat cover to the wire later using these two grooves.

The finished seat bottom looks great, and has the contour of the original.

The 57 Corvette, just as the year prior, had distinctive interior panels that featured small squares embossed into the interior material. These are best described as a waffle pattern. We were interested in restoring our seats to as close to factory condition as possible with quality and fit to match. Al Knoch carries NCRS-approved materials to totally restore your Corvette interior, but what really impressed us is that he has a full staff of professionals who travel with him to major shows to do the installations while you wait! There is a fee for the installation, but seeing some of their tricks of the trade and some of the pitfalls this job entails, the cost of installation is money well spent.

We met up with Al Knoch at the NCRS Meet in Orlando, Florida, and followed along as interior specialist Javier Torres made our 57s seats look new again.